Tech -- Culture -- Humour
If I could find something about vampires or Alice in Wonderland I think this build would manage to incorporate most of the major themes we love inworld. It might sound a little strange, and it could be that the owners would describe it differently, but I think this combination works and it’s a great place to visit.
My journey began today with this photo↑ by LookatmyBack. I know he likes steampunk so I thought I’d check out the region and see what was there.
If like me, iTunes is the centre of your digital music consumption, then you may have considered using the new iCloud based service called iTunes Match. What it does (for approx $25 US per year) is scan your iTunes library, matches it against the songs Apple has in its inventory, and then uploads any unmatched songs to iCloud. THe end result (theoretically) is that your entire music library is now in the cloud and can be access by any wi-fi iDevice.
Unfortunately for what seems like a significant number of people, the reality is a lot different. For me the deal-breaker is play counts. I’ve always set myself a little challenge each year to play each and every song in my iTunes library each calendar year. Therefore I have a smart list set up that includes any song not played since January 1st this year. Since setting up iTunes Match in late January I’ve seen that playlist constantly increase it’s play count. I have an iPad 2 as the only current device that uses iTunes Match to stream music (I did have my iPhone using at as well but gave up in disgust as you’ll see below)
An example from just yesterday (on my primary device i.e. the one from which all content was uploaded to iTunes):
Number of songs left in playlist prior to updating iTunes Match: 6994
Number of songs left in playlist after updating iTunes Match: 7029
Number of songs left in playlist the next morning after launching iTunes: 7175
There’s no obvious rhyme or reason to it and it drives me insane. Have a look at the scope of issues on Apple’s own discussion forums and you get the gist of a range of other issues with the service. Whether it’s play counts, upload issues, crashes or lost music, there’s a bunch of problems with this paid service. It certainly has promise – if it worked like it should, I’d probably be writing a gushing article on how great it is and awaiting the Apple fanboy accusations.
My advice right now is: avoid iTunes Match like the plague until some much-needed bug fixes are put into place.
Over to you: do you use iTunes Match and if so have you had issues or not?
Early this morning I logged into Second Life to visit VWBPE locations around the grid and started to collect notecards/freebies which was fun. As you can see today I have updated my blog for VWBPE 2012 which I hope all my readers will like. I went over to the first event on the listings called Conference Orientation Meet-and-Greet where the SL community started to catch up and hang out.
There’s some seriously scary stuff out there in the world — from bird flu and terrorism to depleting our planet of natural resources. There’s not a lot that the average person can do about much of the things that may keep us up at night. Luckily, there’s one scary prospect on the horizon that we can help with — and it doesn’t require lining your pants with aluminum foil! Aren’t you lucky?Imagine if you will, some of these possible real-life scenarios:A shadowy character crouches unseen in the bushes. He doesn’t have a gun or a knife, but he has a laptop. He watches as his prey walks by. Invisible radio waves emitting from the credit-card in his wallet get picked up by the laptop, recorded, and saved onto a cloned card. For all intents and purposes, this man becomes you, and has decided to go shopping.Or maybe he picked up the passkey that lets you into your office building. With ease, he can now walk into your secure office building and steal your company’s equipment. The next morning, security guards are waiting in your cube to have a chat.The nightmare scenario was brought forth recently – a bomb lies waiting in a garbage can. Sensitive electronics read the identification cards and passports of the people who walk by, waiting until somebody of your nationality comes close…It’s a scary world out there. Credit card companies and governments are putting RFID chips in your cards and identification, sometimes without your knowledge. Protect yourself and your money with a wallet that specifically inhibits those radio frequencies from escaping until you pull your card out. Did we mention you don’t need to put foil in your pants? It’s important to us that you know that you do NOT have to put foil in your pants. Very important. No foil. In your pants… none… zip… nada.
Via www.thinkgeek.com
Chinese censors are actively targeting social media to quash discussion of banned topics, suggests research.The US study gives the most in-depth look at the extent of China’s policing of discussions on microblogging sites.Analysis of almost 60 million messages from China’s equivalent of Twitter suggested which topics were banned.It also revealed that China tuned its censoring activity to be more aggressive in places where political unrest was high.
Via www.bbc.co.uk
Tateru Nino has a great story on how Linden Lab will no longer be providing SL economy metrics:
Essentially, over the years, the figures have been progressively stripped of the supporting data that gave them meaning, and now hardly anyone can understand what’s left. That kind of makes it a waste of time to extract the data and generate the reports in the first place.
Of course, the other side of the coin is this: When a company stops reporting some key statistic, it is almost always because the figure suddenly has gone South or otherwise looks bad. The Lab has stripped key items out of the reports on a number of occasions, as I mentioned, and it doesn’t take any great stretch of the imagination to figure that they were taken out because those figures were going sour, or that they appeared to be going sour because other data that would have aided in the interpretation of the figures was absent.
The latter tends to have a bit of a snowball effect. You stop publishing a metric that might be misinterpreted as bad, and then eventually its absence makes another metric misinterpretable as bad, until you’re left with a small set of metrics that don’t tell anyone anything terribly useful.
Here’s a post I did in May 2007, showing how far the transparency has declined. Here’s hoping this decision isn’t indicative of a more fundamental decline.
A study from Brigham Young University (BYU) has revealed online role-playing games like World of Warcraft both negatively and positively impact marital satisfaction.The study looked at 349 heterosexual couples, dividing the respondents into two groups: one in which both spouses gamed, and the other in which only one spouse gamed.
For couples in which both spouses play, the study found 76 percent said that gaming had a positive effect on their marital relationship, particularly couples who interacted in-game.The average age of the respondents in the nationwide survey was 33 years, while the average marriage length was seven years. Of those couples in which only one spouse gamed, 84 percent were the husbands; of those couples where both gamed, 73 percent of those who gamed more were husbands.
Via au.gamespot.com
Video games and education. Two passions in my life that I tend to keep separate. I’ve been on the learning side of education for the last 16 years, but last fall I made the transition from student to teacher. I was dead set on bridging the gap between my life as a gamer and my life as a teacher before the school year even started. I plastered the walls of my classroom with posters of Link, set up Mario action figures across my desk and crafted 8-bit sprites all over my board. My sixth grade students loved that I was interested in video games — just like them! As sixth graders, most of the boys in my class were more focused on Call of Duty and Madden, they had no knowledge of the magic of platformers, RPGs, or adventures games.I wouldn’t be as well read as I am today if it wasn’t for video games.
As I was describing my video-game-related teachings to my buddy Courtny, we began talking about incorporating gaming into education. Why not? I probably wouldn’t be as well read as I am today if it wasn’t for games like Pokémon Red and Blue. Games that relied on text. How else would I have known a large Pokémon was blocking Route 12? Video games are surprisingly helpful in school. They often promote reading, help students think through problems, and give players a sense of accomplishment to strive for. Courtny and I weren’t the first to think of gamifying a classroom, but maybe we could come up with the best system to date.
Via www.kotaku.com.au
Students at Maine Endwell High School have entered in to a virtual world in order to learn about financial planning for their future.
Visions Federal Credit Union provides this free educational tool.
Maine Endwell is the first school in New York State to use the game, Modoh Island.
“Our hope is that eventually it will be something that the teachers can use to supplement their classroom without our hands on in it,” says Colleen Barton, Youth Educator for Visions Federal Credit Union.
To play, students create an Avatar and start with $10,000 dollars.
They have to make choices from buying cars to paying school loans, and buying or renting a home.
“I just picked the basic schooling and I was just careful about the car, and I picked a smaller house, cheaper and cheaper car. Smart decisions for then and now I can get a nicer car and house,” says Julie, an 11th grade student.
Via www.wbng.com
Uh-oh! Another big bank is the subject of a depositor run amid charges its chairman has run off with customers’ money. Thankfully, this scandal is only taking place in Eve Online, a space-age virtual reality created by CCP, a games developer and Iceland’s coolest company. But Ebank’s troubles in the ether may offer some valuable lessons for earthly banking and regulation.
Eve is one of the more successful so-called massively multiplayer online games. Some 300,000 people – as it happens, nearly equal to the population of Iceland – pay $15 a month to navigate characters that pilot inter-galactic spaceships, manufacture and trade goods, mine resources and enter into big alliances – or bloody battles – with one another.
Central to Eve’s strategy, players develop economies within an “anything goes,” free markets framework that allows them to expand their fleets, buy weaponry and equipment and bolster defences. Indeed, Eve boasts 66 different marketplaces for some 5,000 items, with more than a million transactions a day.
Enter Ebank. Because players often do not have the interstellar credits – abbreviated to ISK, also the official abbreviation of the Icelandic krona – they need to expand their fleets, an enterprising player created a bank that would accept deposits and lend to players who would pledge assets, like their spacecraft, as collateral.
Via www.telegraph.co.uk
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